Chipo's story

This is Chipo. She’s 12.

School has just ended for the day and she’s rushing home, back to her small village in Zambia’s Choma District.

She’s rushing because she has a lot to do before the sun sets. She veers from the road and turns off onto a footpath that will take her through a series of fields leading to her home.

After a few kilometres, she meets her grandmother, who is pulling vegetables from the family field. Chipo puts down her schoolbag and helps her grandmother pull the large spring onions, then carries an armful back to her home.

When she arrives, her first priority is always to greet her family’s elders, her great- and great-great-grandmothers. Both women are sitting on old feed bags under a large tree in the middle of the family compound.

Chipo calls to her great-grandmother, Agnes, as she approaches and the woman responds by clapping her hands together and smiling, a traditional greeting here in Zambia’s Southern Province. She takes Chipo’s hand and squeezes it warmly. Then Chipo turns to her great-great-grandmother Martha, who is 98, and greets her in the same way.

Both Agnes and Martha are blind, and have been for decades. Their loss of sight was not the result of old age, but of a bacterial infection called trachoma. Being blind in a place like the villages of Zambia can make daily life very challenging, and it has fallen to Chipo to help her elders function.

Chipo ducks into the family home and quickly changes out of her school uniform. Then she carries a green bucket to fetch water from a pit on the other side of their field a few hundred metres away. The water there is grey and murky, and Chipo lowers her small frame down into the sunken area and fills her bucket.

In September the pit will dry up and she’ll have to walk a full 1.5 kilometres to get water from the bore hole – one bucket at a time.

She carries the heavy bucket back to the village and pours it into a black, ashy pot sitting atop a smouldering fire. While she waits for the water to heat, she grabs a small broom made of reeds and brushes up the area, clearing away the corncobs and egg shells that have accumulated throughout the day.

Chipo then goes over to her great-grandmother and helps her to stand before leading her by the hand into a small enclosure built from brush grass. She returns to the fire and scoops out a smaller pot of the warm water, which she brings into the structure to help her great-grandmother bathe.

When she has finished, she leads her elder back to her place under the tree, and then repeats the same process with Martha, her great-great-grandmother. The sun is already setting by the time Chipo begins preparing dinner, mashing the maize into a fine mush from which she will make nshima, the national staple. She heaves the pestle, a large stick with a blunt end, over and over into the wooden mortar. When she puts the food on to boil, she uses the brief respite to duck back into the house and do some homework.

She bends over her notebook, working on her Tonga language writing skills. She’ll work on her homework more after dinner – after she has cleaned up and helped her grandmothers into bed.

In the morning she’ll wake up at 5am and work on washing her grandmothers’ clothes, a process that again involves fetching water and then scrubbing each article by hand. She’ll do this and sweep the home before she walks the seven kilometres to school for a day of trying to focus on her studies while thinking about all that must be done when she returns home.

There are times when Chipo’s days begin without school. When her grandmother goes to Livingstone to sell the family’s vegetables, Chipo is the only one available to help her elders get through their days. So for three or four days in a row, Chipo will miss school as she stays home cooking and cleaning for her disabled elders, helping them get to the toilet and to bathe.

It’s easy to fall behind on schoolwork during these times of absence. The last time her grandmother was away, Chipo failed an exam. But what choice does she have? The family must sell vegetables to make money, and her grandmothers need almost constant assistance to survive.

For as hard as Chipo works to care for her elders, her grandmothers’ blindness, caused by trachoma, has had a devastating impact on her family’s ability to thrive here in Zambia. Living in the village without sight makes almost all everyday tasks impossible. There are no microwaves to cook food - only hot, dangerous fires. There are no footpaths with tactile paving bumps to warn you when you are nearing an intersection - only a confusing network of meandering dirt paths.

Sightsavers is working hard to ensure that this story is a reality for fewer and fewer families in the developing world. More than 21 million people currently have a trachoma infection - an infection that can be easily treated and has been eliminated for decades in the developed world.

Thanks to the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) SAFE strategy and the work of Zambia’s Ministries of Health and Local Government and Housing, Sightsavers Zambia and Akros, stories like Chipo’s are becoming rare. Through targeted surgery outreach, administration of drugs that treat active trachoma infections, and promotion of face washing and environmental cleanliness, we’re putting elimination in plain sight.

At school, students are learning the value of face washing, at home, good water and sanitation practices are being promoted and monitored through novel data collection methods, and throughout the communities patients in need of sight-saving surgery are getting the care they need.